In the Cruellest Month
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon In the Cruellest Month You should see The Fall of the Roman Empire if: 1.) You can take a musician friend who owes you money. After 10 minutes of Dimitri Tiomkin's...
...And they create a kind of snobbery of violence: The lush interiors and exotic scenery, and the lushly exotic dames, are only marginal enhancements of this aristocracy of brutality...
...That's a much higher rank...
...Violence is granted every privilege of preening itself, and is made to seem thoroughly enjoyable-needless to say, you will not be so gauche as to identify yourself with the fellow who gets killed...
...And when he lays his hands on the film his enemies secretly shot of him having intercourse with one of his girls, he cavalierly dumps it in a Venetian lagoon...
...It goes Henry Orient one better in its anti-intellectualism, it turns death into a running gag, it contains film-within-a-film travesties undistinguishable from the main body of the film, it has jokes to make the angels weep and costumes in which they wouldn't blow their noses if they were the only cloths of heaven...
...best of all, he is on the Side of Right...
...In short, Junior Miss has grown up into a full-size miss...
...The arts...
...No one but he could have made goodness look so dear, ardent, purblind and irresistible, victorious over everything from one of the most brilliantly suasive villains to the most exiguous English subtitles...
...So yesterday and yesterday and yesterday creeps in this petty pace, signifying nothing...
...He was technical adviser for this mess...
...This seems improvident, for it would have been the perfect follow-up in the series...
...2.) Your grandparents are still ambulatory, and you want to give them the treat of reliving the Victorian romances: "Where could we go, Livius?-Anywhere we'd be, we'd be alone, Lucilla.-I'm Caesar's daughter!You're a woman...
...The World of Henry Orient is a clean, happy, dishonest little picture that is wonderful anti-intellectual fun for the entire family...
...There are so many patronizing jokes about it, you'd think psychiatrists are a minority group...
...Yet the mind boggles at quantity...
...after three hours, you can safely remove his wallet...
...Jean Renoir has directed with quiet ingeniousness never encroaching on reverence...
...At What a Way to Go!, the embarrassed silence is louder than the loudest laughter...
...Now Mike Hammer is, at least, a bit of a slob...
...Of the two highly-touted young girls, Merrie Spaeth seems to me extraordinary in name only, but Tippy Walker, with better direction, could yet make a real actress...
...Speaking of the Fleming novels, Alex Comfort observed (in that highly challenging book, Darwin and the Naked Lady) that Bond, "the eponymous hero who tortures suspects, ravishes women and for preference shoots them afterwards, is the emissary of society-or at least he stands for authority and its uses, for the unlimited rights of aggressive behavior which it confers, and he is expected to carry the admiring acquiescence of his readers.' Dr...
...3.) You have been wondering about the stature of Will Durant as a historian...
...Jules Berry's villain, Nadia Sibirskaia's ingénue, and Jacques Brunius' enchanting comic bit with his dog, Daisy, are unforgettable...
...Nothing more forsaken than a little girl with a genius I.Q...
...The film could have been much more satisfactory if the overrated Bresson had not, as usual, directed with that glaringly naked literalism that some persist in admiring as economy of means...
...Intelligence...
...Note that this critique is delivered in Carnegie Hall, where any less militantly antiintellectual screenwriters than Nora and Nunnally Johnson would have substituted Tchaikovsky for Porter...
...It is a poetic parable written by that most marvelous of minor poets, Jacques Prévert, so marvelous that he almost makes the word "minor" meaningless...
...we are supposed to admire the superior taste and wisdom that informs the movie while it makes tasteless fun of art and intellect and yet we must not take any of its inanities seriously...
...No one but Prévert could have brought off this ingenuous mélange of gently deadly irony, innocent hilarity and sonnet-like rapture...
...But forgiveness and love avert catastrophe...
...Or in our censorship laws...
...But Bond is murderous, witty, condescending, frightfully in and frightfully chic...
...what it needs is quiddity...
...Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow brings together Loren and Mastroianni, who, according to producer Joe Levine, are the greatest screen lovers since Garbo and Gilbert...
...The fully rendered violence, the toughly cynical epigram-epitaphs with which each righteously murdered spy or thug is suavely dismissed, these are what is remembered...
...and bursting out laughing...
...Angel-is a film that is absolutely fine...
...And there is a scene in which a young man forgives his girl for having been impregnated by the villain...
...It is like a fat man entering a party with the exclamation, "Look at me, aren't I fat...
...In the film, it is the unforgiving mistress, smouldering with however righteous hatred, who is-if only by implication-left alone and lost...
...So, too, in the Bond films...
...The mildest thing to be said about this film is that it is an abomination...
...Worst of all, this staggering concoction of Comden and Green's tries, cravenly, to have it both ways...
...and it has Shirley MacLaine...
...Sex, however, must emerge ancillary, hasty, casual, interruptus...
...What do you want to feel superior to...
...As for the acting, Peter Sellers is such an expert impersonator that one regrets his inability to add to his list of impersonations the Peter Sellers that was...
...And true love...
...After 10 minutes of Dimitri Tiomkin's score, he'll be limp...
...Vittorio de Sica gives us another glossy triumph of the neo-unrealistic cinema, and the scenarists bring us the same lovable Neapolitans, (Alberto) Moravian rich bitches, and whores whose hearts continue to maintain the strictest gold standard...
...But whereas Diderot's was a moral tale, managing to forgive everyone with the possible exception of the girl's mother, Bresson and Cocteau give us a political allegory: There can be forgiveness for whorish collaboration and, by extension, Vichy France itself, if weakness is expiated and understanding prevails...
...The actors are not only perfect, they are also quintessentially human, and beautiful down to their very ugliness...
...Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), by Robert Bresson, has a screenplay by Cocteau based on the Mme, de La Pommeraye episode from Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, which had already fascinated Schiller...
...Is that any reason for putting them into a vehicle of roughly the same vintage...
...They are unhappy as can be and their parties swarm with phoneys...
...Comfort (also eponymous) is all for sexual release even if accompanied by some violence, but, both as biologist and poet-novelist, he deplores what he calls affectless violence...
...Psychiatry...
...moreover, he represents an ultra-reactionary, unofficial point of view, and is a loner often in conflict with the police...
...I, alas, cannot admire an economy based on sheer poverty...
...It makes you weep and laugh and proud to be alive...
...The festival of French film classics at the 57th Street Normandie now yields two notable films not previously released hereabouts...
...The word should have been "help...
...A proud lady, spurned by her noble lover, enables a charming slut and her mother to pose as retiring gentlewomen, makes her ex-lover meet them and fall in love with the girl, sees to it that he be driven by ungratified desire to marriage, and then informs him that he has married a whore...
...he gets, as a fringe benefit, all the female flesh he can eat...
...and a panegyric of simplicity, decency and socialism...
...The rich...
...Thus we are supposed to laugh at wealth even while being swept off our feet by it...
...the murder scene alone can stand as an example of sotto voce artistry at its best...
...There is a poetess here who is an idiot, a concert pianist who performs incessantly at Carnegie Hall though he is a consummate notalent, advanced modern music that is pure Mantovani with an occasional steam whistle added...
...Paula Prentiss is a lovely young woman, and there must be some other profession open to her...
...For George Roy Hill's direction goes from terribly arty, terribly old tricks to passages of total literal-mindedness, and the girls are allowed such bad diction as, "A blood pact means that we will hump each other as long as we live...
...But I am full of praise for Maria Casarès' fire-and-icebreathing wronged woman, and for Lucienne Bogaert's aging beauty torn between greed and love for her daughter, a touching mixture of solicitude and stupidity, a performance of unmitigated humanity...
...Every word and gesture in it is a balm for all the crimes against mankind, from war to What a Way to Go...
...But, I suppose, there must be status symbols even in proto-pornography, and those who prefer their sex and sadism in cutaways rather than dungarees must be so indulged...
...The acme of vulgarity, however, you have to seek in What a Way to Go...
...It is a completely touching, lyrically simple plea against exploitation, clericalism, hypocrisy...
...The poor, on the other hand, live in houses only a shade less sumptuous, and are happy as all getout...
...and we must accept every form of the outré-from dialogue to décor-as being at the same time glamorous and yummy...
...The values of the film are perfectly revealed when the raisonneuse, a scrumptious middle-aged aunt, remarks during the aforementioned Steam-whistle Concerto, "If this is music, what is that stuff Cole Porter writes...
...it is hard, if not impossible, to convey its joyful plenitude, but it is assumed that endless quantity can make it look as interesting as quality could...
...The second Ian Fleming book to reach the screen, From Russia With Love, confirms the notion that James Bond is merely a fancy-pants Mike Hammer...
...We can respond neither with seriousness nor with amusement, only with embarrassed silence...
...even so, it is piquant to note the blending of the styles of La Voix humaine and the Encyclopédie...
...Let us get a few more overrated duds out of the way...
...Cocteau's dialogue is relatively restrained...
...Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935)-the translation cannot convey the pun, The Crime of Mr...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 8
